Depositing your Digital Thesis
If you registered to start your research degree in or after October 2009, in addition to
depositing a single printed copy of your thesis with the Examinations Office, you must also
upload a digital copy of the thesis to the University’s repository: White Rose E-Theses
Online. Students who registered before October 2009 may also follow this procedure.
The digital copy shall be in pdf format (or other format acceptable to the University and
appropriate to the medium) and shall be identical to the printed copy. Any material
included in your thesis which risks breaching a third party’s copyright, privacy or security
may be redacted if necessary.
Under some circumstances you may wish to place your e-thesis under embargo. Please see
the Appendix to this guide for further information.
Follow these instructions to upload your thesis.
1. Firstly, create a user account for White Rose E-Theses Online. Start from the
homepage:
http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/
Last updated January 2017, Examinations Office (RSAT) and Information Services
2. Complete the registration form:
Select York
from the list.
Your Student ID can be found
on your University Card.
Provide an email address on
which you can be contacted
after you leave the University.
Create a username and
password of your choice.
Type the text you see in the
Captcha box. Then click
Register when you have
completed the form.
3. You will receive an email sent from White Rose E-Theses Online to the address you have
provided. The email contains a link which you must follow to confirm your password and
complete the registration process.
4. The link will expire after one week. If you have not completed your registration by this
date, you will need to start again.
Once you have registered, you can deposit your thesis immediately. Follow the instructions
on the next page.
Last updated January 2017, Examinations Office (RSAT) and Information Services
5. Return to the White Rose E-Theses Online homepage, and Login with the username and
password you have created.
6. Click on Create Thesis. Complete the form provided.
At any time you can click the question mark symbol [?] for help, or refer to the FAQs.
e
a
b
c
d
a) If you have registered for an ORCID (a unique digital identifier to retain throughout your
academic or professional career), you may enter it here. More information about ORCID:
http://orcid.org/
b) Your email address will not be made public on White Rose E-Theses Online. Readers
sometimes contact the service administrators to ask for more information about a
thesis. If you don’t want these messages forwarded to you, leave this box unticked.
c) If you have more than one supervisor, add another row.
d) If you are registered with more than one department, Add both.
e) If necessary, you can save the form partly-completed, and return to it later.
When you are ready to move on, scroll to the end of the list of departments, and click Next.
Last updated January 2017, Examinations Office (RSAT) and Information Services
7.
Enter the required information about your thesis. Boxes marked with a yellow
asterisk are obligatory.
a
b
c
d
a) The title of your thesis:
• Should not end with a full stop, but may end with a question mark
• Cannot be rendered in italic text
• If you have a subtitle, it should be preceded with a colon [:]
• Only use capital letters for the first word and for proper nouns.
b) Enter your abstract as plain text. Formatting is not possible. If your thesis did not have
an abstract, enter a summary of the content here.
c) If you intend to embargo your thesis to protect publication opportunities, or because it
contains sensitive information, you may also wish to withhold your abstract from public
view. You must provide an abstract for box (b) which outlines the content of your thesis,
but this can be less revealing than your examined abstract. In such a case, you must
enter your examined abstract in box (c), but this will not be made public.
See the Appendix to this guide for more information about embargoing your thesis.
d) You can choose to add further search terms which will attract readers to your thesis. This
should not be necessary if your title and abstract are self-explanatory.
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8.
Scroll down to complete the form:
a
b
c
a) You must select the correct month, but the day is not obligatory.
b) If necessary, add any clarification which will help Exams Office staff understand the
nature of the material you’re depositing.
c) For the benefit of readers who discover your thesis in the repository, you may wish to
add links to related publications or other research outputs originating from your work.
Move on to the Next stage of the deposit. You are now ready to upload your thesis:
9. Choose a file to upload from your pc or cloud storage.
Last updated January 2017, Examinations Office (RSAT) and Information Services
10. Set the status of your file:
a
b
a) Creative Commons licences allow you to specify what use can be made of your thesis.
The default licence setting (“CC-BY-NC-ND”) prohibits readers from using material from
your thesis for commercial purposes, or transforming it in any way. Any quote taken
from your thesis must be attributed to you.
You can choose a less restrictive licence if you wish. Further information, including a
Licence Chooser tool: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
b) You may choose to embargo your thesis (withhold the file from public view) for up to 5
years initially.
Before you select an embargo period, you must read the Appendix to this guide, and
discuss your position with your supervisor. Once your thesis has been successfully
deposited, your supervisor will be notified of any embargo period you have chosen.
Last updated January 2017, Examinations Office (RSAT) and Information Services
11. Preview how your thesis will appear on White Rose E-Theses Online:
If necessary, you can revisit Previous stages to amend your entry. Or if you need to ask for
advice before completing your deposit, Save and Return.
12. Read the Depositor’s Declaration. When you are satisfied that you understand the
licence you are granting to repository administrators, choose to Deposit Item Now.
A green “confirmation” message will appear. Additionally, you and your supervisor will
receive a confirmation email.
Your thesis will not appear in the repository until it has been approved by the University of
York Examinations Office. This will happen when you have deposited both the digital copy
and the printed copy, and your award has been submitted to the Standing Committee on
Assessment for approval. Following this, your thesis will be released into the repository. You
will be sent a further email to confirm release.
Contact the Examinations Office if you have any questions about the deposit process which
are not answered by this guide or the repository FAQs:
[email protected]
Last updated January 2017, Examinations Office (RSAT) and Information Services
Appendix: Do I need to embargo my thesis?
Open access to your thesis brings many benefits:
• A wider audience for your research increases its potential impact.
• Raising your own profile may lead to employment opportunities or invitations to
collaborate.
• Your department, institution and funder may gain kudos from your achievements!
However, in some circumstances you may have good reason to delay this opportunity:
• Do you have a contractual commitment to your funder or external partner which
prohibits open access to your research output, for a designated period or
indefinitely? (This is not likely unless your work was commissioned with a view to
commercial exploitation, or is highly sensitive).
• Could your research lead to a patentable/marketable output? You may wish to keep your
findings private until you have explored commercial opportunities.
• Has your research been carried out as part of a team project? Would it be appropriate to
keep your findings under wraps until other aspects of the project are concluded?
• Does your thesis have potential for development into a peer-reviewed journal article,
chapter in an edited book, or monograph? Your target publisher may have issued
guidelines on whether they will accept a submission based on a thesis which is already
public: look for Guidance for Authors on their website.
In many disciplines, to attract a new target audience, it’s likely that you will need to
present your findings in a different way. Any further publication may be sufficiently
distinct from your thesis to avoid a conflict of interest.
• If you and your supervisor agree that your research findings present a risk to individual or
community security or health, you may wish to consider the maximum embargo.
You and your supervisor will be contacted shortly before the embargo expires, and offered
the option to renew. Ensure that you have provided a stable email address.
Redaction
If your thesis incorporates confidential data, or third-party copyright material which you
don’t have permission to reproduce on an open access platform, redaction (obscuring
problematic content) may be a more appropriate solution than embargo, in order to
maximise the audience for your research without potential for harm.
Contact the Examinations Office if you wish to deposit a thesis with some material
redacted from the open access version. You must also deposit your examined thesis,
although this can be embargoed indefinitely.
Last updated January 2017, Examinations Office (RSAT) and Information Services